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JESUIT EDUCATION

wish to say with a due sense of responsibility, that the Catholic parent who sends his son to a non-Catholic public school deliberately and without a shadow of justification exposes him to the almost certain loss of his faith, and to the grave danger of the corruption of his morals."[1]

The attitude of Catholics towards the question of religious instruction in school is, therefore, very clear. Of those Protestants that now advocate religious instruction, not a few commit a serious mistake. They recommend a sort of religious teaching which will suit all and offend none, an "unsectarian, undenominational religion," as they style it. Such a religion does not exist, and what is taught as such does not deserve the name of religion. This has been emphatically stated by many distinguished Protestants of widely differing religious opinions. Of American educators we mention President McCosh who made some very noteworthy statements on this subject.[2] Even men of most advanced liberal views condemn the teaching of an "undenominational" religion. Professor Ziegler of the University of Strassburg, who is not in the least "clerically biased," wrote two years ago in his General Pedagogy: "A knowledge of the religion in which one is born forms part of general culture, and the state would have to look after this part of education, as after all the rest (sic!). But here enters the Church as competitor, demanding that the instruction in religion be imparted to her children according to her views; an undenominational instruction in religion, which is advocated by some, is non-

  1. The London Tablet, September 14, 1901.
  2. See his remarks on "Boston Theology," in the sixth chapter of Christianity and Positivism.